It’s pretty evident by now that this President isn’t afraid of the so-called third rail. In fact, he has shown a willingness to contradict the prevailing wisdom on issue after issue: DADT, tax increases on the wealthy, financial reform, health care, immigration, regulating carbon emissions from power plants, Israel, Cuba, and many other do-not-touch political quagmires which have been assiduously avoided by his predecessors.

As he is now clearly looking at his last two years as an opportunity to make major changes to address entrenched problems, I have one to add to the list.

Today, the President declared the war in Afghanistan over. There is a Status of Forces Agreement and we’ll leave behind some trainers and counterterrorism people, but that will be a tiny fraction of the 140,000 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan when he took office.

In 2011, similarly, he drew the Iraq war to a close. Of course, Iraq has since proven unable to govern itself or to defend itself against ISIL, but that’s another story. The boots-on-the-ground war there—Bush’s shame—was finally dispensed with.

My hope is this: that before leaving office, President Obama will declare the war for which the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Miltary Force provided legal authority has been completed. I hope he will specify that the people who are conspiring against us through the lens of Islamic extremism are not the same people, nor the same organizations called out in the AUMF, and that the AUMF is therefore now null and void.

The 2001 AUMF has been used as a blank authorization for military action anywhere in the world so long as it can be tied to “Al Queda or its affiliates”, but that language does not appear in the legislation itself. It would be a strong move on the part of the President to rein in the dangerous precedent that the Presidency may use 9/11 as a pretext for a broad range of future military actions.